A piece in today’s New York Times print edition opens with a damning phrase: “Israel’s war against Hezbollah.”
It’s a strange characterization. On Oct. 8, Hezbollah opened fire on Israel in solidarity with Hamas’s brutal massacre of Israelis a day earlier. Since then, amidst Israeli counterstrikes, the Lebanese terror group has launched nearly 10,000 rockets and explosive drones at the Jewish state, killing around 50 Israelis, mostly civilians. Israel upped the military pressure on Hezbollah this week with ingenious and intense strikes on the group, which in turn escalated its bombardment of Israel.
To describe the Hezbollah-initiated fighting as “Israel’s war against Hezbollah” is to whitewash the terror group’s aggression and shift the onus for the clashes onto Israel.
This attempt to warp readers’ perception is unfortunate, but it’s hardly uncharacteristic. The entire piece, “Iran’s Dilemma: How to Preserve Its Proxies and Avoid Full-Scale War” by Steven Erlanger, follows the tenor of its opening phrase, skewing heavily toward the narrative of Israel’s extremist neighbors and fitting seamlessly with the paper’s overall coverage of the conflict.
The opening paragraph not only casts the fighting as Israeli aggression, but characterizes future Iranian violence as an act of defense and retaliation:
Israel’s war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon is another embarrassment for Iran and its new president, raising the pressure on him to strike back at Israel to defend an important ally.
But Iran refuses “to be goaded by Israel” into a larger war, Erlanger writes in the next paragraph, citing “analysts.” Whoever those analysts are, they sound a lot like Iran itself, whose president is paraphrased a paragraph later saying that “Israel was seeking to trap his country into a wider war.”
Iran, a leading force of destabilization in the world, merely wants to “restore deterrence,” Erlanger insists in his own voice.
Thousands attend a memorial event in Argentina dedicated to the 85 people killed and more than 300 wounded in the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, July 18, 2022. Credit: AMIA.
Without a hint of skepticism about the Orwellian language, he shares that Iran calls the murderous terrorists it keeps afloat its “forward defense” against Israel. (The supposedly defensive proxies named in this passage include Hamas and Islamic Jihad, known for their suicide bombings that target and tear apart civilians in restaurants, pizzerias, buses and dance clubs; Hezbollah, whose most notorious attack along with its partner Iran was the slaughter of 85 people in a bombing of the a Buenos Aries Jewish community center; and the Houthis, whose slogan calls for “a curse on the Jews” and who, without provocation, opened fire at Israel in the months following the Oct. 7 attack.) Erlanger later endorses the phrase himself and goes even further, saying that “the proxies represent Iran’s strategy of forward defense to protect the Iranian homeland.”
And so it continues from Erlanger and his handpicked voices.
Israel? It’s not so much defending its citizens as it is “seiz[ing] an opportunity” to go to war.
Hezbollah? A “first line of defense.”
Without Hezbollah? The Iranians are “vulnerable.”
Israel? “Trying to bait Hezbollah.”
Hezbollah? “Disinclined to engage” in a wider war.
Israel? “Caused panic in Lebanon.”
Iran? “Can’t swallow this forever.”
Iran’s missile barrage on Israeli territory and Israel’s subsequent strike on Iranian territory is stripped of chronology when Erlanger writes that “Israel and Iran … exchanged strikes on each other’s territory.”
The tens of thousands of Israelis forced from their homes by Hezbollah attacks are minimized as “thousands.”
But what’s missing from the piece is as telling as what’s in it. The word “terror” cannot be found in a piece about groups designated by much of the world as terror organizations, and its patron, a U.S. designated state sponsor of terror.